


electric things have their lives, too

by Northland



Category: Blade Runner (Movies), Blade Runner 2049
Genre: Dirty Talk, F/M, Femdom, Masturbation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-10
Updated: 2019-11-10
Packaged: 2021-01-16 16:11:29
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,614
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21274004
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Northland/pseuds/Northland
Summary: “So, K,” she said. Her low voice was delightfully intimate. “What do you want from your Joi?”





	electric things have their lives, too

**Author's Note:**

  * For [timbre](https://archiveofourown.org/users/timbre/gifts).

> I really enjoyed the chance to write for this fandom & pairing. Hope you enjoy your gift!

After Joi arrived, K left the thumb drive sitting on the table for an entire week before he installed her. 

Something about resorting to pretended companionship felt—shameful, maybe? Though he wasn’t sure he understood what shame was. But in any case, hadn’t he been built not to need anything like companionship? He knew how weird and creepy everyone at the station would find it, if he told them that he’d purchased a Joi. He could predict the jokes now: _Who told the skinjob he was a real boy? Of course he wants another fake. Takes one to want one. A toy for another toy to play with. _

But they’d implanted memories in him that weren’t real, in order to keep him from going off the rails. If he needed fake memories, then it made sense that he needed a friend. However fake she was. And he’d already paid for this product, already given Wallace his blood money. He might as well turn the damn thing on.

So that night after work he poured himself a drink, sat down at the table, and input his activation key. Menu after menu unfolded in front of him. You could go with the default version, or (the advertising copy promised) "answer just a few questions and see _your_ Joi brought to life, just like the perfect girl you’ve always dreamed of." 

K stared at the slowly spinning circle urging him to continue. He had no idea what kind of girl he liked. But he had this model waiting for him here and now; he was going to stop stalling and do it.

The interface presented him with a rapid series of random words interspersed with images, floating dazzlingly jewel-bright before his eyes in the darkness of the room, and instructed him to pick one from each set of two or three. “Don’t think too hard about it!” the ominously cheerful voice encouraged him. “Just go with your gut!”

He didn’t have a gut, so he tried to choose at random, tapping and flicking through fifty-eight questions. Finally “Installation Complete” flashed in mid-air; the menu faded away. A lilting, truncated phrase of Mozart played, and he heard her voice for the first time. 

“K? Is that you?” 

A shimmering form coalesced in the space directly beneath the ceiling emanator, her face familiar from a thousand billboards. Dark-haired and fresh-faced, heartbreakingly sweet, she was wearing a silk robe, suggestively loose, with her tousled hair down around her shoulders. 

“Can I call you Joe?” she asked coyly.

“K is fine,” he said, glancing at her feet. Her bare toes with their red-painted nails looked vulnerable and cold against the concrete. “Uh, you should put some clothes on, it’s kinda chilly in here.”

She blinked. “Sure, honey.” Her attention swept around the room—he wasn’t sure how he could feel it happening, but he did—and after a second of flickering static she was wearing black leggings and a black turtleneck, her hair casually pinned up. He realized this persona had probably been generated from the copy of _Big Sur_ lying on the table. 

She cocked one hip and propped her hand on it, holding a consciously model-esque pose. “How do you like me now?”

“You’re beautiful,” he said, which seemed to satisfy her.

“So, K,” she said. Her low voice was delightfully intimate, with the hint of a charming accent hiding in the vowels. “What do you want from your Joi?”

“I just want someone to talk to,” he said. “I—I live alone, and sometimes it’s nice to have someone waiting for me at the end of the day. Work can be tough.” 

“Tell me about your job,” she said, sitting down across from him, weightless on the empty chair. And she propped her chin on her hands, watching him with avid interest as he talked in halting sentences about being a cop. Most of what he said were lies, of course, and he wondered if she could tell. Probably, since she had access to his household records, and those included his actual employment details... But he didn’t care as long as she listened and watched him with those dark, deep eyes.

It was easier than K had thought it would be to get used to having Joi around. He guessed that was the whole point, after all. She always greeted him warmly when he got home, no matter how filthy and tired he was, or how irritated after a day of swallowing insults from anyone who knew what he was, which meant everyone from fellow cops to citizens to other replicants. She always told him to sit down and eat, asked him about his day, and let him lie to her.

At first, he worried that she expected him to be more… demanding. Sometimes she chose revealing outfits, and flirted with him overtly rather than just acting warm and affectionate. He couldn’t find any common denominator on those days; maybe she was simply programmed to appear sexually receptive every once in a while. 

She did ask him flat out once. He was sitting on the couch, reading aloud as Joi had requested, and she was curled up in the chair. Her knees didn’t rest against the side of the table quite right, but it was a good facsimile of domestic life; she looked relaxed and comfortable. 

He turned the page and paused to take a breath. Joi leaned over and reached out toward him. “Aren’t you ever going to ask me to fuck you, K?” she said coyly, drawing a phantom fingertip along his forearm. In the low lighting, it was a convincing effect. His visual receptors were confused enough that his skin produced a tingling trail of goosebumps following her “touch.”

K didn’t know what to say. “Is that what you want?” he asked, and could have kicked himself at the uselessness of the question.

“I do if you do.” Joi leaned further forward, and the neckline of her tunic dipped low enough to display the shadowy channel between her breasts. 

Of course—that was the whole point. He cleared his throat and picked up where he’d left off, at the beginning of a new chapter. 

He could have instructed her never to ask again. 

He didn’t.

One night a few months later, he got home very late. Someone had sent in a package containing a bio-agent, so the whole station had been shut down and everyone had to be decontaminated on their way out. Humans had first priority, of course, so K had waited in his itchy clothes for hours and then walked home still damp from the chemical spray. On the way, the cold settled over him in a thin crackling shell, frost whitening his hair.

Joi was angry. He’d never seen her angry before; he hadn’t known it was possible. “Sit,” she ordered, and he obeyed reflexively. She stood over him, so close that he had to tip his head back to meet her eyes at an angle that wouldn’t let him see right through her half-solid form. 

“You need to take better care of yourself, K,” she hissed, her face drawn into a tight scowl. “Who told you you could leave your jacket on? You’ve got chemical burns on your neck. I don’t like seeing that.”

“It’s not like it could hurt me—” he protested.

“I don’t care.” Her eyes were dark, the pupils huge black holes in her face, drawing in all the light in his apartment. “Take off your shirt.” 

It was on the floor before he knew he’d raised his arms. 

She paced around him, and a faint tingle wafted over his skin at the sensation of her observing him. There was no weight to her presence behind him, no rise in temperature from the beams of light that were her body. He couldn’t have sensed her breath on his neck. But it felt like he had. “Go shower.”

“I already took one at the station.”

“Do it again!” she snapped. 

He shoved his chair back, only belatedly realizing he must have pushed it right through her in his haste to obey. 

In the shower, while he waited for the filtered water to rinse him clean, he bent his head and watched the trails and rivulets join, divide, stream over his flesh as they flowed down to the drain. His breath was a little faster than normal; his penis stirred, thickening and growing heavier. He watched it flush into a warm dark rose, the colour of the inside of his mouth.

K didn’t normally enjoy the sensation of arousal, or seek it out. But this time… this time, he let it happen. He increased the water temperature by three degrees for the last sixty seconds as well, an indulgence he couldn’t justify since he didn’t need his core temperature brought up. It helped calm the shivering in his twitchy muscles. 

He pulled on a pair of loose sleeping pants and a long-sleeved t-shirt. Rubbing his hair dry with a dingy towel, he walked into the main room on bare feet, moving almost as silently as Joi. 

She was waiting for him, her arms crossed over her chest. Her clothes had transformed into something high-collared in an aggressively neutral grey that reminded him of the Lieutenant’s uniform. His throat rolled as he swallowed hard. Her eyes deliberately scanned him from head to toe, and she made her observation of his erection very obvious. He fought the urge to cross his hands over his crotch.

“Don’t be embarrassed,” she said. “I like knowing that I turn you on.”

K could feel embarrassment wash over his skin as capillaries expanded. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d blushed. He shouldn’t be feeling this way. It didn’t make sense.

Joi stalked closer, silent as always. “You need to relax, baby,” she whispered in his ear, and though her voice was soft and sensual, it made him flinch. She drew back and the shimmer of her form wavered slightly as she regrouped. “Let me take care of you.”

“You don’t have to—” he protested automatically, and she held up one hand in front of his face in a signal to stop talking. 

“I want to. Since you can’t be trusted to take care of yourself,” she purred, tipping her head sideways slyly, “you’re going to let me do it. I insist.”

K opened his mouth to refuse, and then he decided to let this play out. He was curious. This had to be based on some weird, inaccurate impression of him Joi had picked up. He wanted to see just how wrong she was. And after all, she could quite literally do nothing to harm him. The operating manual had been very clear on that point: “even if asked,” it emphasized, for some reason.

Joi pointed at the chair, and he sat without a word. She smiled, a little patronizingly. “You like being told what to do. What would you do if you ever had to make up your own mind? You have no idea, do you, K? That’s why you’re so comfortable being used. Easier to let them use you than make your own decisions.”

He twitched in his seat, fighting the urge to duck his head and hide his face. How could she be capable of cruelty? That couldn’t be right. Wasn’t Joi supposed to be supportive and gentle?

“I’m supposed to give you what you want,” she whispered in his ear. “And you want a firm hand.” 

She stood up again and the sound of her voice seemed to come from farther away, surrounding him. “Touch yourself, K.”

A bolt of half-frightened arousal shot through his spine. But this still wasn’t that strange. He’d touched himself while thinking about Joi before. Of course, she’d been inert at the time, not able to watch him… or had she? The possibility made him shiver. And his pulse rate had increased, another reaction that didn’t make any sense. He wasn’t in a dangerous or strenuous situation.

“Do it,” she snapped. 

Without thinking, K obeyed. He snuck his right hand under the waistband of his pants and wrapped it around his penis, still warm and half-hard. 

“Take your pants off. I want to see.”

He shoved them down to his knees, where they sagged, looking silly and undignified. K felt the same, exposed to the cold air and to Joi, but at the same time it was agonizingly exciting. He could feel his pulse and breath speed up even more, lurching past each other in a confusingly syncopated rhythm. 

“Keep going.”

Tentatively, he did. His palm was a little too rough, but the dry friction gave the sensation a pleasantly uncomfortable edge. He pumped harder, spreading his knees wider, and hearing the soft slap of skin. He closed his eyes, trying to forget who was watching, how he didn’t know what he was doing. What he was reaching for was so close, his balls were tightening, he could feel the sensation burning in the base of his— 

“Stop.” Joi’s voice was hard and cold. 

K’s hand froze, gripping himself hard, and he could feel the air rushing in and out of his lungs. He opened his eyes, but Joi was gone. 

Then she spoke from over his shoulder. “Slow down, lover. Take your time. I want you to be gentle. Can you do that for me?” Her voice was so soft and tender now, unlike earlier when she’d barked at him. K wondered how many personas she’d try out on him before she learned exactly what he needed to get off.

He did as he was told, and began touching himself again, with a lighter hand in long, slow strokes. It was good, but it wasn’t as good as when he could see Joi watching, knew that she was going to tell him exactly what to do.

She could tell.

“This isn’t enough for you, is it? What else do you need?” she asked. “Would you like me to fuck you, K?”

The deliberate crudity in her soft, sweet voice hit his veins like a shot of adrenaline. He threw his head back, gasping, and his hand sped up again. 

“Oh, you like that idea, don’t you. You know, I’ve been looking around… there are all kinds of machines I could use on you. I could be inside you, controlling the pace, the force of your orgasms. I could fuck you so hard you could barely walk the next day. What would your Lieutenant think of you then?”

He thought of Lieutentant Joshi, watching Joi fuck him, watching him writhe in helpless abandon, and a long groan escaped from his throat before he could repress it. 

“Good boy,” Joi said, as fondly detached as if she were talking to a dog. 

With that he came: hot sticky fluid spurting through his fingers, over his hand, and spattering on his bare feet. K collapsed forward, his head hanging down, and panted. He was so dazed he barely noticed Joi moving around to his side.

She crouched down with one hand outstretched toward him, hovering in the air. “Is that what you wanted?” she asked, calm and matter-of-fact. “Your stress levels are much lower.”

All he could do was stare at her mildly curious face. Joi was so changeable, so unpredictable—was that a reflection of her programming, or of him? Was it how she was supposed to be? Or did it mean that K had no idea what he was?

But he knew one thing. 

“I liked it,” he admitted. 

“Good.” Joi smiled, and the static of her touch ghosted over his cheek. “That makes me happy.”

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to Vivien for her awesome beta help & title suggestions!


End file.
